Small SKUs, Big Problems: Inventory Management Strategies for Toy Vendors

For toy and game Amazon Vendors, managing a vast range of small SKUs can quickly become overwhelming. Even seemingly minor inventory mistakes such as miscounts or misplacements can snowball into significant operational headaches, costly chargebacks, and lost sales opportunities.

The Unique Challenge of Small SKUs

Managing toys, games, and licensed merchandise often means juggling hundreds or even thousands of small-sized SKUs. The compact nature and variety of these items exacerbate inventory tracking complexities, making accurate stock and order management a persistent challenge.

Typical problems include:

• Time-Intensive Manual Processes: Without streamlined solutions, your team spends excessive hours processing orders, reconciling inventory, delaying dispatches and reducing stock availability. diverting attention from growth-focused activities.
• Difficulty packing mixed cartons: Small SKUs are typically packed into mixed SKU cartons, but these can be easily miscounted, leading to discrepancies between your shipments and Amazon’s receipts. Increased Chargebacks and Shortages: Frequent inaccuracies result in shortages flagged by Amazon, directly translating to costly deductions and chargebacks. If mixed cartons are part of your workflow, these issues can multiply. Check out our recent article on Managing Mixed Cartons. 
• Missed Price Discrepancies: You expect Amazon to pay $10, but they only pay $9. With thousands of SKUs, these small differences can slip through and quietly erode your margins.
  
  

Why Accurate Order Management Matters

Order Management is a critical part of processing Amazon Vendor Orders, but this can take hours or even days when dealing with Toys and Games orders. Order management typically involves checking the stock levels, item pricing, minimum order quantities, as well as dispatch value, to ensure that orders should be released. Sometimes it also can involve checking profitability as well as the value of goods shipping to a particular Amazon Fulfilment Centre. 

With order management, it's about achieving both speed and accuracy. Too slow and you risk having late shipments and PO on Time Accuracy chargebacks. Too fast and you risk rejecting items you could have shipped, or accepting something that had an unfavourable margin. Ensuring you have systems and processes in place to manage both situations is crucial to any Toys and Games vendor.

Amazon Vendor  Management Strategies for Toy Vendors

To help your business stay ahead, consider these detailed inventory strategies:

1. Automated stock syncing: Make sure that your Amazon Vendor POs are quickly and easily synchronised with your stock and pricing for each item with a robust EDI connection.
2. Rapid Order Management: Use bulk actions to process all the days orders in just a few minutes. Ensure that the checks incorporate minimum order quantities, desired prices, and any other internal allocation checks.
3. Mixed carton Support: Toys and Games are often shipped in mixed cartons, so ensuring that your picking and packing process is fluid can transform your Amazon Vendor process to make dispatches simple.
4. Automated Invoicing: With many dispatches each week, ensuring a tight link between the ASN and the invoice is critical for ensuring that the goods that are shipped are also billed. 
   
   

"We’ve been with KhooCommerce for a long time, and it continues to deliver exactly what we need. When we need to adjust our workflow, their team is always on hand to ensure seamless integration with our in-house ERP system.

Recently, after nearly three years away from handling Amazon orders directly, I stepped in to manage our largest single-day order volume in over five years. The entire process took just five minutes! With KhooCommerce, stock levels were synced with our ERP, orders were imported into the system for invoicing and accounting, and everything was sent to the warehouse within an hour.

This level of efficiency is incredible. We genuinely couldn’t have managed that volume of sales without KhooCommerce.”— Mike Palmer, Director of Systems, Pyramid International

By embracing comprehensive order management strategies, you can reduce inefficiencies, minimise costly errors, and strengthen your Amazon relationship, helping you stay in control, even with a high volume of SKUs and the complexity that comes with managing a diverse product range.